Open courses extend the concept of "open educational resources" by making not only the content but also the learning and interaction within a course freely available.

How does it work?

Each week, a series of readings, videos, or podcasts, will serve as a conversation starting point. Discussions can be held on this site (once you've created an account, you can use the blogging service within this site or the discussion forum), existing blogs, forums, or other sites. Please tag all contributions with "edfuture" so they will be discoverable.

Daily emails will be sent to course participants who have signed up for the newsletter.

Weekly live conversations will be held in Elluminate.

What's the course about?

Discussions and proclamations of the future of education, learning, training, and development are popular topics at conferences and in publications. For educators, leaders, and administrators, it's easy to "get lost" in the numerous predictions. What is the next wave of technological change? Are learners really different today? Is our current model of education unsustainable? What can educators do to anticipate and respond to trends?

Unfortunately, predictions of the future are often more of a guessing game than a rigorous process. This course will utilize methods of futures thinking to explore a variety of trends and statistics and provide a series of potential scenarios and future directions. Participants will be actively involved in tracking critical trends, exploring their educational impact, and plan for ways to prepare for important changes.
In order to explore potential paths for education, elearning, and training, we will spend time developing a framework for analyzing trends and for generating and evaluating scenarios.

The course will focus on developing methods and mechanisms for making sense of change patterns. Future-focused thinking is an important skill for all educators, leaders, and administrators. During the eight-weeks of this course, we will explore approaches to separating "the nonsense" from "the potential" proclamations of education's future.

Who will be facilitating the course?

This course will be facilitated by Dave Cormier (UPEI) and George Siemens(Athabasca University).
Source: edfutures.com